The Greatest Gift

I have been thinking a lot these last few weeks about what I would like the Holiday Season to feel like this year.

In the past, it has always brought me a mixture of pleasure and stress, the pleasure being in entering into the spirit of giving and the time spent with family and friends, and the stress being in figuring out how to spread out my time, energy and money in ways that feel right for me and don't leave me too depleted.

I have been pondering a lot about how to keep the stress levels at a minimum this year, because I feel that I am at a place where this is very important to me. For anyone who has ever worked with me or had any kind of contact with what I truly believe to be most important in our lives, the phrase "the most important thing is to love yourself" is familiar .... but what does that really mean? And how does that apply during these particular holidays, when giving to others is central to the festivities?

I know the first shock for anyone that hears the words "you must love yourself before anyone else" has to do with the fact that it's a complete turnaround from what we've always heard (perhaps especially women, but I know men get this message too, although in different ways), that we must learn to love others and put ourselves in second place. And there is no question that this kind of message is important as well, because it is human nature for us to be rather egotistical and want everything in our lives to be "all about us".... so it's good to be encouraged to look at how we affect other people with our words and deeds, and become more sensitive to that, and more truly caring about not only those others who are closest to us, our family and friends, but also "all" others. This type of sensitivity and "goodness" is a basic requirement for any healthy kind of human community, and it is something that we all are challenged to work on for all of our lives.



The problem is that this message of "love others as thyself" is often actually "love others so they will love you", or "love others so you can demand that they will do what you want them to", or many other variations on these themes, and we are unaware of these deeper motivations. We are all in search of and also in need of connectedness to others, and there is nothing inherently wrong with this - to the contrary, I truly believe that this need for connectedness is one of our greatest gifts from Life (or God or however one may want to call it) ... it actually is the Gift of Life itself, that we are all called to try to find, and slowly unwrap, during the course of our lives.

The challenge lies, however, in recognizing that we each are absolutely unique and differentiated beings, and that until we begin to see ourselves for who we really are, and can express it into our reality, there is really nothing to "connect" to anyone or anything else! Every religion recognizes this, and every spiritual path offers guidance to finding the way to becoming true to oneself, so we can then be of service to Life with our own unique gifts.

But the journey is a long one for most of us! We often have an inkling that something is calling us to look more deeply at who we are and where we are going, but it seems impossible to really follow this call, because we have so many things to do and so many people to care for, just to survive, or to at least maintain what has meant for us a bit of security and predictability in a reality that is anything but secure and predictable!

From what I am seeing, the recent economic crisis has meant that a lot of people have been violently shoved into a place of having to re-evaluate just about everything in their lives, and it is not a fun or "pretty" experience! I, too, have been challenged to re-organize my life and to accept situations that in the beginning felt like absolute disasters, so I am not just talking from a pulpit here!!

But the further I move along in my own journey, the more I can see how times like these are truly incredible gifts, not only for each of us individually, but for our family relationships and our communities, for all the kinds of relationships that we are engaged in in our complex lives.

An apparent lack of resources calls us back to the essentials, and asks of us a very simple question: "What do YOU have to give?" Not "what can you afford to give", but what is it of yourself that you can offer to those you love and care about, to your community, and to Life itself? To be able to answer this question, we must be able to first see who we are, and this brings us back to the whole problem of being able to love ourselves. If we do not see and appreciate ourselves for who we are, we have nothing to give that is truly authentic. We can spend our whole lives trying to live up to an ideal we have either inherited from our families and our cultures, and feeling either miserable and sick most of the time because we can never live up to these expectations, or perhaps just somehow dead inside, like an automaton, going through the motions but never really feeling complete.

It's really scary, though, to make a step towards truly loving ourselves, because it often means we have to confront, and change, some very basic beliefs that we have about how things "should" be. Sometimes it can mean even having to step away from others whom we love but we know are not good for us, or are no longer good for us if we are to continue growing. It almost always means shifting the focus from getting from others what we feel we need and want, or from doing for others so we will look good and thus receive their approval, and deciding to become more deeply responsible for our true happiness. This can feel like a huge leap into a void ... we know what we are leaving behind, but we cannot see what lies ahead. Many of us at this point decide to turn back, because it is just too plain scary and painful, and perhaps we haven't yet been able to truly feel that there might be other ways to navigate this emptiness. Our internal judge, also, can be brutal ... and impossible to face on our own.

All this is especially true when we are facing major life changes and decisions, but I know it is true for me, too, even now that I have no major life decisions to make ... I am just pondering how to make the holiday season meaningful and less stressful!

My gut has been telling me for weeks now to almost completely leave aside the whole "materialistic" thing, and to experience Christmas in a completely different way. I will confess: I want to experience Christmas for Me this year. I want Christmas to be a lot about how to respect and care for myself, and less about how I look in the eyes of others, or what I am giving to them. Yes, a very "selfish" point of view!!! But I can feel that something is brewing here, a whole new concept of myself as well as the holiday, which for me, as a natural "people pleaser" (which essentially translates into "if I do and be the way it seems to me others want me to do and be, maybe I'll get the love I need"), one who has spent much of her life (up until a few years ago, it's getting better and better for me, but is still a great challenge) bending herself into a pretzel in an attempt to "get" the love and happiness I need and want, is a very big deal.

I am not associated with any specific organized religion: I was raised in a Christian denomination, as most of us in this culture (and when I use the word "Christian" I mean all those churches born out of the original one based on the teachings of Jesus, the Orthodox and Catholics and all the various Protestant etc. off-shoots - sorry guys, you have a lot more in common than many of you would like to think!), but early in my life I realized that my journey for personal and universal truth had to go beyond that. That early decision has led me today to consider myself extremely devoted to a spiritual path, but one that amply and freely partakes of every school of wisdom that I have had the honor and the opportunity to get to know along the way. I have some definite preferences, but I consider myself someone on a continual path of discovery, more than someone who has discovered any static or definite "truth" (besides a few basic ones that are shared by pretty much all religions and philosophies, from what I have seen).

But despite my not feeling connected to any specific religion, there is no question that I consider Christ to be a great master and teacher, and the celebration of his birth has a very special meaning to me. I "know" that most of the major religions in the world have some sort of festivity around this time, because it coincides with the Winter Solstice, the longest night of the whole year in the northern hemisphere. I "know" that this celebration has been essential to keep hope alive in our hearts, that even in the darkest, longest night, a "light" can appear - the Light of the World in the Christian religion, seen in the coming of the Christ.

But what I've been wondering a lot about these last weeks is, what is this "light" that we are all looking for? And specifically, who is Christ and what does he represent?

When I think of what I know about Jesus, about how he lived his life and what he taught, I realize that he is a man who managed to truly BE HIMSELF. He had some very clear ideas about what he felt was right and wrong, about how to connect with God, about what "right relationships" were with the other people in his life. What he taught was completely unacceptable for the "establishment" of his time, but that did not stop him one bit. He stuck with his truth even when he was tortured and killed for it.

He was so faithful to his own path, that he had no second thoughts whatsoever when he had to do what was right for him. And at the same time, he is one of the greatest teachers of love and forgiveness that humanity has ever seen, and his actions were so powerful in this sense that even after 2 millennia they serve as guides to a couple billion people the world over, making the Christian religion (with all its various cults) still the largest in the world.

So if I think of Christ and Christmas in the light of these "facts", I realize that indeed Christmas this year is assuming a completely new significance for me. If I look at Christ as a teacher of how to "thine own self be true", while harmonizing one's love for oneself with love for others, and making it into a powerful, revolutionary, unifying force ... I can see that "the light of the world" has to do with exactly each one of us BECOMING OURSELVES. One of the things Jesus said continuously was to do as he did, to live as he did, and that anyone who would follow his teachings could do even more than he did. Many people have interpreted that to mean that we can all become miracle workers and healers, or that a "proof" of our being like him can be seen in how "good" we are, how much we give to others, how supposedly charitable and tolerant we are and all the rest.

And I am not saying that those are not important parts of his teaching, but today, as I write these words, and after weeks of mulling over how to truly EXPERIENCE Christmas, instead of have it fly by in a flurry of shopping, food, family and perfunctory religious and/or cultural rites, I realize that truly the call to devote myself to the "light of the world" means recognizing the Divine Spark within me, however that may manifest itself.

At the moment, it is manifesting as a need to go within, to meditate and rest and be away from the hustle bustle of the world ... and believe me, this is not an easy thing to do, when there are all kinds of "shoulds" in my head - "I have to do the shopping, and the cleaning, and the wrapping, and the .... and I also have to do all the work I need to do to get the money I need to buy all this stuff!!!!!". As usual, my body has come to my rescue, as it often does when I am incapable of willingly following the call of my soul, and I have not been well physically ... so it's been a bit easier to STOP , and let all of that external stuff go, and even silence the negative voices in my head.

And I am not at all saying that everyone should experience it in this way!!! This is ME, no one else, this is the way the Divine Spark manifests in me, whereas I know perfectly well that for others it is the complete opposite. For others, if they were to try to force themselves to be a hermit like I am, they would be absolutely miserable, and their Divine Spark would be snuffed out in a second!! (My fiance' and I are opposites in this respect, and much of our journey together so far has been learning how to first accept and then honor and encourage these differences ... definitely a challenge at times, but also one of the most wonderful learning experiences in this sense that I have ever had the opportunity to have).

So I am not at all offering up some kind of generalized suggestion to follow my way. What instead inspires me to be here this morning and write all this out arises simply from this desire to share how deeply I feel this message of Christ, his call to us to BECOME OURSELVES and to connect with the Divine in any and every way that feels the best to us .... because if we do this, if we put this in absolute first place, then, and only then, can we truly offer our unique gifts as a service to our loved ones, to our communities, to our whole world - to all of Creation.

His life also shows us that this is not a painless process - but we can see how the extraordinary effects of his example have continued to ripple and affect generations and generations of human beings, urging us ever onward to become more than we were before, to embrace our transformation first into unique individuals, so that we can then offer our precious gifts to the Whole.

There is no question in me any longer that when we manage to do the same, to honor ourselves, to treat ourselves with love and kindness, to allow ourselves to BE and to stop running around trying to be like others, to develop our own unique connection within our own hearts to the Divine, that the positive effects this has on our environment is no less important than Christ's was. Just like he said.

This is the greatest gift that we can give ourselves, give others and give Life, and I know many might be asking "so what does this MEAN in my life right now!?!" (if you have managed to stick with me this far!!).

And I do have a suggestion for this. Love is a journey that we cultivate step by step and day by day: it is not with one gesture that we "love completely", either ourselves or anyone else. It is through small gifts and decisions that we make progress along the path.

It could very well be that as you were reading me, in your heart of hearts you felt something, some pull towards something you want to give yourself, be it a material object, time for yourself, doing something you have been longing to do. (And careful: while a gift to ourselves can also be changing something about us that we don't like or know is not truly good for us, this is not the time for this; this is not about "fixing" something that we feel is not right, it is about honoring something that is already there). You may have immediately tossed it off, feeling that it is "too much" ... too expensive, too difficult, too scary etc. etc.

And if that is the case, realize that you can break it down into smaller steps, smaller pieces ... what is important is that you make a gesture towards this "heart's desire", and recognize that every gesture of love that you make towards yourself is indeed the greatest gift of all, even if it is very small, even if it seems insignificant.

From this place of Love for the Divine Spark within you, that is there even if you might not be feeling it right now, any action that you may take to honor this is something that releases an enormous energy, and serves also as a positive example for others. Just think what a wonderful place the world would be if everyone truly Loved this Divine Spark, and were capable of nurturing it and then sharing it with others!

For this reason, it is truly my most profound wish for anyone who might be reading me to be able to embrace the unique Spark that you are, and celebrate your very existence, and give yourself even one small gift. This  will open the door, even if it's just a crack, to the Greatest Gift you will ever know, and that will allow you to then be able to share it with others from the very deepest, and most authentic, place in your heart and soul.... and thus begin a chain reaction of Great Gifts all down the line .......

Love to all,

Martha